So I have dipped my toes into food experimentation. Back in about… 2012 my mother came home and said due to her worsening heart palpitations and the medication they put her on, she can no longer have anything with caffeine, and that unfortunately included chocolate. Her favorites included chocolate, and for a while there was a really awful adjustment period where none of us would eat chocolate at home/around her because… well thats not fair to her. There was this coffee substitute however, called Pero, and it tasted pretty accurate to some coffees I had drank in the past, it definitely hit those flavor profiles, and I knew carob existed but it had a reputation as a “healthy chocolate substitute” thats terrible because people would recall “chalky textures” and all around misery relating to it, and known baked goods revolving around carob were obsessed with being gluten free and vegan at the same time. That’s unnecessary for my needs, and I can’t imagine other people in my mother’s position being very thrilled with the results either, we’re here for fat rich sweet treats not diet tears. If you like that stuff no shade to you, but that is not the goal of my project. I started experimenting with carob, and from my first experiment with it in baked goods, brownies, I leaned that it behaved…. Not the same, it had a sweeter note to it as well as a bit sour (not unpleasant and i learned that was because of the roast level, ahah, first problem solved, go for medium roast carob) another thing it did was fall much more than the brownie recipe i had made a thousand times before was supposed to fall, almost making it a fudge consistency (with a bit of that chalky texture, though it was in no way dry) and losing its crumble. Another thing it would do is resist being held into a suspension like chocolate would in my hot chocolate recipe, but this laid the groundwork for how i would “adjust my recipes” and my first clue was how cakes would fall, there was some funky chemistry fails happening there, so I went looking. The pH of cocoa is [approximately represented as ~ ] ~ 5.2 (these numbers have been double checked today, assume the rest are as well unless otherwise stated) and carob is a pH of ~ 6.5 which is a bigger difference than there should be in a cake, but before I decided to painstakingly figure out how to adjust for that, I remembered the existence of **dutched/alkalinized** chocolate, which is a pH ~ 6.8 *that is a lot closer* close enough in fact that i grabbed a cake recipe using dutch processed chocolate (i still lived with her, this had to be quick otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise) and for the first time in years, she was able to eat her favorite cake, a “german chocolate” cake with 7 minute icing, it did not fall at all, the texture was perfect and was in no way chalky, I had substituted the fat with my blend of ghee, cocoa butter, and avocado oil (i use sunflower usually because its more neutral in flavor but avocado worked here). I had added the Pero to the liquid element of the cake which brought the more mature “bitter chocolate” flavor that carob needs, even if its medium roast. I found this channel looking at chocolate processing techniques, because while there ARE carob chips, they suck bad, its got that chalky texture people talk about, thats unacceptable for my standards, so I will be experimenting with combining it, carob, and cocoa butter (contains no measurable caffeine, she can have white chocolate) I am currently waiting on my melange to arrive. If this works it will be the first recorded carob bar that doesnt suck, I’ll share the recipe when I make it.
